


Goodbye Blue Sky

by illwynd



Category: Norse Mythology, The Avengers (2012), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Blood, Community: norsekink, M/M, Mythological References, Suicide, cyclical time, past and future
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-02
Updated: 2012-11-02
Packaged: 2017-11-17 14:16:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/552451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illwynd/pseuds/illwynd
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Years have passed. Thor remains on Midgard, but all his mortal friends are gone and the realm doesn't need him anymore. He is tired--and long ago Loki swore to kill him someday. Thor seeks out his brother to see if he will keep his promise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Goodbye Blue Sky

**Author's Note:**

> Written to fill a [Norsekink prompt](http://norsekink.livejournal.com/10823.html?thread=22917191#t22917191), and posting here for all souls day/the day of the dead.

The city skyline had changed beyond recognition, yet Loki was sitting staring out at it, drink in hand, thinking how the Midgardians had turned out to be more like to the Aesir, at least in their taste for tall, swooping, gleaming architecture, than either people might once have imagined.  
  
This city, as it had become—it was a far cry from how the mortals once had lived. In this age, everything was clean and well-ordered. Each structure towered like a monument, and people hardly ever set foot on the true ground; instead they lived at heights even the birds envied and they turned their attentions above, rather than to the dirt from which they had sprung. The broad cloudless blue of a perfect sky, tamed and curling warm at the horizon that seemed now to lie beneath their feet. A brightness that barely concealed the eternal spread of stars, the great distances beyond.  
  
The stars were within reach to the mortals now, stars with their distant planets that were separate and unknown to those who had for millennia walked among all the realms that grew upon the branches of Yggdrasil.  
  
Loki was sipping at his drink, sweet and garishly colored and artificial, as a shadow fell across his table under the eaves of the café. He didn’t bother to look up.  
  
“I don’t want to say I told you so, but I did,” Loki said, amid the clatter of dozens of mortals fastidiously and unconsciously ignoring both the dark-haired figure sitting nearest to the drop at the edge and his newly arrived companion. “All this started with your scientist woman; you should be proud. I feel certain she would be.”  
  
It had been some time since he had seen Thor. Decades, perhaps—it was so hard to keep track of time, the more you had of it—but Loki knew that Thor would still be moping. _Moping_. The line of Thor’s descendants with Jane Foster had long since flickered out on a great-great-great-grandson who felt no need to have children of his own. And then, not long after, Steve Rogers’ slow aging had at last brought him to the end of his time. In the age that followed, Mjolnir had trouble calling down storms in the face of the mortals’ weather control devices, and flying about in a bright red cape had anyhow become gauche. Not to mention that the Midgardians’ troubles now seemed of a sort immune to the solution of a hammer’s blow and a stalwart heart.  
  
Of course, Loki thought, time had hardly been any kinder to him, even if no one any longer remembered the god who had come, so disastrously, to attempt to rule them.  
  
Loki waved his fingers over the tiny sensor at the edge of the table to call for another drink—a pair of drinks this time, if only because Thor still balked at comestibles in such unnatural shades—as Thor sat down without a word.  
  
Thor’s shoulders slumped dangerously low, his head drooped forward. His face, what Loki could see of it, was as drawn in weariness as Loki had ever seen it. Even his hair had lost its luster. Loki drew his hand back as he stared.  
  
Rising and falling, a low buzzing hum filled the air, a sweep of air currents, and it stirred their hair like wind on feather down. A glint of metallic light flashing across the side of the building. Reflections and shadows. “Yes, she would,” Thor muttered, with none of his old enthusiasm that had once seemed endless.  
  
Loki swiped his thumb along the sweating drink that had been brought to the table by silent automatons. “Well, you’re here. What is it you want from me?”  
  
He was watching the boundaries of Thor’s body, the way he twitched and pulled his foot up onto his knee as if they were still children at lessons, put his hand to his eyes as if to ease an ache behind them. “Why must I want something? Could I not simply be here for you? Many times, brother… many times I came, simply to be with you…”  
  
“Yes,” Loki smiled. “You did. But this is not one of those times. Tell me. Do not let your honesty fail you now; you can rely upon me to hear your secrets.”

Another flash of metallic wing passed across their table, blinding.  
  
“I am tired,” Thor said, lids heavy, shadowing the blue of his eyes. “And I thought of… you said many times, swore you would do it.”  
  
Loki stayed utterly still.  
  
Thor’s head was low as a cow heading for the slaughter, as a condemned man before the gallows. “You swore to have my death in your hands at the end. If you still desire it, you may have it now.”  
  
Loki narrowed his eyes against the brightness of the sun.  
  
— _Leaning over the side to peer into the silver-grey waters below, the light shimmering on it like a mirror, shadows of fish passing beneath as Thor guided their little boat to the place he had chosen, where they would while away the hours. Young, eternally young, and the world so fresh and new and green, each hill new-sprung and each breath sweet in their mouths_ —  
  
“Come back in a month,” he said. “Then if you still wish it, I’ll do what you ask.”  
  
*  
  
Loki spent most of the month calling in favors. Starting small, a few lonely debts owed him by his last handful of believers. Trading up, using their payment to buy his way into bigger games and adding his winnings in with what he got by shaking out the pockets (metaphorically speaking, in most cases) of a few powerful others whose lives he’d saved over the years or who had benefitted in one way or another from his mischief. Once or twice a step was taken backward, out of an inability to resist when an opportunity arose, so rare these days, to stir the stick and watch the swirl of trouble.  
  
But in the end, he came out of it with the ticket in his hand (this again was largely a metaphor, though it didn’t have to be if one really had a preference).  
  
It was a month precisely when Thor appeared on his doorstep, against the grey and ruined backdrop of the ground level of his building on the edge of the city—“his,” though Loki did not actually have any claim of ownership over the dwelling. But it seemed no one else cared. Half of the structure had been destroyed in some long-forgotten incident. Its continued existence was surely nothing more than an oversight.  
  
“Come in,” Loki said, making a little manic bow and grinning as he held the door wide for his brother, noting that Thor looked somehow even more sorrowful than before. His broad shoulders were curved inward, but it was a futile effort: he simply did not fit in this world, and the mighty Thor was nonetheless in no condition to get involved in anything that even closely resembled a battle. He followed in silence to the room where Loki habitually lived, with its broken corner open to the sky, its few comfortable chairs, its bed strewn with soft, stained sheets.  
  
Thor sat on his bed, and Loki brought tea for both of them—hot herbal tea, a very old variety, sweetened with honey and served in antique bone china cups that Loki had most likely not acquired through legal means.  
  
They made no smalltalk.  
  
“So,” Loki said, hands clasped on his knees as he leaned close. “Do you still wish me to send you to Valhalla?”  
  
A caught breath, widened eyes quickly averted. “To Valhalla?”  
  
Loki pushed his cup aside and wandered nearer. “Yes, to Valhalla.” Thor did not turn his head as Loki moved silent behind him, but only when thin, cool, careful fingers slipped beneath his hair and lifted it, absently beginning to comb through it and braid it, as he had not done in many years. “Who could imagine that Thor would end up anywhere else? Of course to Valhalla,” Loki whispered, so close to his ear.  
  
Days of glorious battle and nights drenched in drink, sated and warmed in proud company.  
  
“No.” Thor’s shoulders relaxed under the touch. “I do not wish for Valhalla.”  
  
Loki’s hands stopped moving through his hair, annoyed, exasperated. Quick footsteps on the thin floor. “Then why in the name of Audhumbla’s spittle did you come to me?” Loki crossed his arms. “I spent weeks arranging everything! You could have mentioned, you know.”

But Thor only shrugged, and that in itself made Loki fall quiet. “I’m sorry, Loki. I didn’t think you’d go to such trouble. It’s just that… I’m tired, brother. Tired.”  
  
The blue of Thor’s eyes was a plea in itself, deep as the sky, his head turned and tipped back, throat bared.  
  
When Loki returned the teapot to its heater in the kitchen, he stepped aside to change a handful of markings on the ticket in secret, a few runes’ difference here and there, and watched as they faded from the solid, vivid black of new ink to the wavering shadow of memory. (Largely metaphorical. Unless one was of a particularly literal turn of mind.)  
  
*  
  
When Loki returned he knelt by the table in the middle of the room and drew from beneath it a box that had been hidden—not simply out of sight but hidden from the eye, a simple sorcerer’s trick that was nonetheless effective, although he could not have imagined that anyone would have bothered to intrude on this place, so obviously a ruin, half open to the sky, open to the winds and the rains that never came anymore to the city.  
  
Thor had gotten up to pace the edges of the room, taking in the sight of Loki’s things.  
  
Everything was there, the few treasured possessions he retained from long ago, the mass of worthless junk that he had gathered in the meantime. Clutter piled into corners and swept bare away from the useful surfaces. And there was a sense of greyness, of shadows preparing to encroach upon the coming of evening.  
  
It had become harder to throw anything away, Loki had found, when the cycle was at last broken. Before that it had been so simple. Everything lost would return. Everything cast aside would cling like a bad dream. But now their fates were their own, and the Aesir had found it was not the gift it seemed. Their fates were theirs alone, and alone they were.  
  
— _warm sunlight, blue sky, and Loki was almost asleep when a frantic tipping and tilting began, complete with the sound of wild splashes and the sound of water dripping from a plunging oar, and he moved the crook of his arm away from his face, regretting already the loss of the shade. “Thor, you’ll upset the boat if you don’t stop that,” Loki complained, watching as Thor scrambled for the fishing pole that had been pulled from his hands._  
  
 _Thor laughed and grinned at him, insufferable. “You’ll like it less if I fish up the Midgard serpent, won’t you?”_  
  
 _One of the fragmented lies, half-remembered truths they had spent the morning telling to amuse each other, before sharing the stolen measure of heady, sweet cider that had made Loki sleepy. Tales from other cycles, told in as grandiose fashion as either could manage. For his part, Loki had not told half of what he knew. But there would always be more time_ —  
  
As Loki watched, Thor picked up a broken, silvery faceplate. A piece of a long-defunct Starkphone, by the look of it, and he had it cradled in his big hand, staring down at it with a dense frown.  
  
“You could go home, you know,” Loki called out, the box still sealed and humble before his knees.  
  
“No,” Thor said. “I could not. I have gone to _Asgard_ many times, however, and you could return as well, by now, if you thought you could find any enjoyment in it.”  
  
Loki stifled a breathy laugh. “Do you know, sometimes I forget you were taught some wisdom?”  
  
“Well, I give you little reason to remember,” Thor said, smiling at Loki for the first time since he’d come.  
  
Instead of flipping the latch on the box Loki sat back, letting it wait where it was on the floor, and he beckoned Thor back to sit near him. To talk for a while, if this was to be the last such chance.  
  
After all, their tea was still warm.  
  
*

“And what did you do with it?” Loki asked a little while later, curious, peering at the hammer-shaped absence on Thor’s belt.  
  
Thor’s fingers curled in front of his mouth. Contemplative. “Left it somewhere, I think.”  
  
Loki snorted. “You think? Do you mean to tell me you aren’t sure?”  
  
“I didn’t see that I’d need it anymore. And I could not remember it ever feeling so... heavy.”  
  
Loki stared.  
  
“You need not look at me so, brother. I simply did not wish to carry it anymore.”  
  
Loki could barely remember a time when Mjolnir had not been Thor’s. His brother’s young pride at lifting the weapon for the first time. The way he wielded it like a part of himself. The motion of his fingers along its leather strap for comfort whenever uncertainties plagued him. The weapon of one who had never become king, choosing instead to stay _here_. To protect this realm. And certainly he had needed someone to protect it _from_ , hadn't he?  
  
They had both enjoyed that. The powerful forces of anger and retribution, the drama of knowing that they would come so near to destroying each other.  
  
Loki tilted his head back as he sat on the threadbare couch and did not ask where Thor had left the hammer. He felt sure the desert dust had already swallowed it away—and in this realm, who now would go seeking it? Let the birds rest upon its handle. Let the beasts burrow beneath it, burying it further. Who now would find it? Who could ever be worthy again?  
  
Loki smiled with his neck on his intertwined fingers, and he could feel Thor’s eyes upon him, blue as the sky.  
  
*  
  
Eventually the conversation faltered, and Loki at last opened the dark box.  
  
Thor peered over at him as Loki delved his hands into the glow of light, elbows moving as if he had to shape whatever was within before drawing it out.  
  
When his hands emerged they held a knife, long-bladed, white with light.  
  
The light glared in Thor’s eyes, glassy and deep, and his voice seemed to come from a long way away. “You did always wish for this,” he said. “You have always…”  
  
Loki tensed, stilling, a fine muscle twitching at the edge of his jaw. “You came to me and asked me to do this. You do not get to feel insulted that I agreed.”  
  
“You did not once say you did not wish to do it.”  
  
“And what if I did want to? What difference would it make, if it is what you yourself want?” Loki’s fingers tapping impatiently against his folded arm, at least of the hand that did not hold the blade. “Is that why you came to me for this? Did you wonder whether I would change my mind before the deed was done? Did you hope to absolve yourself of responsibility for whether you remained or not, leave it up to the ineffable chance that is the mind of chaos? Cruel, brother. Cruel indeed to place that weight upon me.”  
  
Thor’s sigh was audible. Heavy. “I’m sorry, Loki. You are right.”  
  
Loki looked away, toward the broken ceiling and the blue sky beyond, to the soundless hum and the distant murmur of hollow machines rising forever into the air. His chin was held high as he let the silence draw out to the point of discomfort.

“Loki?”  
  
“I don’t think I want to do it anymore.”  
  
“Please…” Thor said. “Please, I still...”  
  
Loki, still sitting calmly across from him, put his fingers to his chin, to the beard he still could not be bothered to grow. “But why should I be the one to help you? You can find someone else. You clearly did not want me to agree to your demand. I should have done the _brotherly_ thing and convinced you that you were not as tired as all that, no matter how unhappy it would have made you, shouldn’t I? I should have questioned your sanity. I certainly should not have respected your will.”  
  
The silence that fell was awkward and thin. The verge of argument, just like the last few times they’d met, all over petty and pointless things, annoyances and thoughtless words. They would meet and part again quickly, as if merely being in the same spaces as each other now left a bad taste on their tongues.  
  
— _Loki spat out a mouthful of water that tasted of weeds and fish and silt as he broke the surface. Sputtering and floundering, arm flailing toward the rough, sun-warmed side of the boat. Pushing soaked hair away from his eyes. “You will pay for that, brother,” he cried as he launched himself up out of the water, arms going around Thor’s shoulders to drag him in as well. The battle was rough but the shore was close, and they continued it there, wrestling each other into submission. Until they’d dried and after, until it turned into kisses, Thor’s lips on the side of his face as Loki laughed and pretended to pluck strands of seaweed from shining blond hair. By then he’d wholly forgotten what started the fight. Later, when they thought to return, they found their boat had gone on without them, and they took to the skies to begin the search_ —  
  
“Please, Loki. Who else could I go to? You know there is no one.”  
  
Loki held the glow of the silver knife in his hand.  
  
Thor openly pleaded. And again, it was the sorrow in his brother’s eyes that caught Loki’s wrist and drew him back against his will. Thor pleaded. “What must I do, brother?”  
  
Loki held open his arms and waited for Thor to come into his embrace, their bodies pressed together as if they danced. Or flew.  
  
— _Pulled into the bright sky, the leather strap of Mjolnir tight against Thor’s wrist, and Loki shifted his form among all the birds of the air, giving chase as sparrow, as magpie, as falcon. Racing, winging ahead and looking back with a sharp flash of dark eye as Thor laughed, and when caught he became Thor’s brother again, clinging tight so as not to fall_ —  
  
It had been long since they had flown together, as such. In later years a few times only—and then it was with Thor’s hand gripping his wrist, Loki dangling below, dragged from the broken ground, the curses that poured from his mouth carried away by high thin winds.  
  
Loki let his hand roam from the smooth curve of a hip, up the broad strength of his back, until he felt the dull softness of pale hair against the back of his hand and the warm life of his brother’s throat under his fingers.  
  
Then he pulled Thor into a kiss, one made all of gentle promise and the last warmth of dying embers.  
  
It had been long also since they had done this, and Thor’s hands curled at the base of Loki’s spine.  
  
Everyone else was gone, the world hollow under a brilliant sky, and Loki...  
  
“Only let it happen and don’t fear,” Loki said, murmuring against his brother’s cheek. “I will not let it hurt you.”  
  
*

The knife was, for the most part, merely a symbol. But the blood that flowed from Thor’s chest, hot and slick and deep, was very real, and Thor stared down as he felt the sudden gush of it between them.  
  
— _the gleam of tears that streamed down Loki’s face, over the upturned corners of his mouth. Felt the wet hot sting against his own skin as Loki brought their lips together again, as Loki murmured words Thor could not any longer hear—the spell or a torrent of helpless pleas for something, something, something—could not make sense of the words through the chaos crowding his mind. Greyness encroaching, shadows edged and bright, a thousand, a million moments of memory flowing through him, useless and forgotten things like the feel of_ —  
  
But Loki was kissing him, whispering, holding him as the walls slipped upward and the sky through the broken ceiling began to darken, the last traces of blue lost in a sudden nightfall.  
  
The last thing to cross his mind was the realization that Loki had not said farewell.  
  
*

Thor woke from a dreamless rest in darkness to the sound of water lapping against stone in soft rhythm, and he did not immediately make any move to rise.  
  
The last he could remember had been Loki’s floor hard under his knees, the thick smell of blood and the chemical odor that seemed overlaid on all the air of Midgard. But it seemed long ago, and now it was all wholly changed. He felt a sense of himself as if he had only just then come into existence.  
  
The air around him was night-cool, with a smell of grass and sea.  
  
He blinked as his eyes came open, and he got to his feet, all weariness gone.  
  
No moon traveled a path through the sky, and no stars were strewn across it. It was the sky of night before the world had begun. The sky of night after the world had gone, blackness without end. The waters lapped and whispered against their stones. The breezes sighed and teased at sea and sky. There was nothing but the silent world in darkness, yet Thor could see by some faint illumination—the edges of the forest, the silvery line of the shore.  
  
There was something familiar about the place, and well he supposed that should be—it was, in a sense, nothing more than the farthest reaches of the realms he knew. The farthest end of a field he had walked in a thousand times before, past the bend of a distant hill.  
  
The only thing he did not understand was why he was alone, why there were no others who had passed before awaiting him. But nonetheless his heart was calm. He could wander here until the end of time, let whatever come to pass that would, since all fates had failed—and his own hand had been a part of that.

Thor had just begun to gather himself together to leave when there was a rustle behind him, as of a motion in the grass.

*  
  
The deed was done.  
  
Painfully, his bones aching, Loki laid down the blade that had turned into nothing but hard grey steel, wiped his hands futilely against the red stain down the front of his shirt, a stilted laugh dying in his throat.  
  
Thor’s face was changed, the lines sharper and colder, and Loki made the last few preparations with a creeping feeling of strangeness. Arranging Thor’s body, laying him out on the floor at his full length, arms folded on his chest. The skin of Thor’s fingers cool and white. The dull blond of his hair as Loki brushed it gently back from his brow.  
  
And then Loki checked the broken electrical circuit—how ancient this building was!—and the things that would burn to send Thor on his way.  
  
He stood out on what he considered his balcony for a few minutes, staring up at the blue, blue sky and thinking how once he would have given anything for this moment and would have considered it a victory in itself.  
  
Loki was the last immortal god to set foot among the people of Midgard.  
  
But then he shook his head, not laughing, tossing a wild tangle of black hair over his shoulder. And he went back inside to sit next to Thor’s body.  
  
He almost wished he would be there when the burn began, to watch this ruin go up in flames, to watch the smoke stain the sky of an empty world and know that was the end of it.  
  
But he had already waited long enough, and what is Loki without Thor?  
  
The knife bit, and his mouth twisted in a grimace, left by himself with the pain. Lonesome and alone, so that it didn't matter that with his last strength he crawled up to lie beside Thor, staring out of the hole in the sky.

*  
  
Thor turned then, and saw what he hadn't seen before—what hadn't been before: there, in slumber, Loki lay with one arm bent above his head, near the oval of crushed deep green where Thor himself had lain, and his body was half-bared, skin white in the darkness, the feathern cloak of sable-blue fallen from his shoulders.  
  
His own cry was the first voice Thor heard in the dark land. But Loki did not waken, only frowning a little in his sleep, his brow drawing tight.  
  
So Thor waited, prepared to wait as long as he must, finding smooth stones to sling into the waters, letting them fly from his hand and listening for the distant splash, and he gazed at Loki’s sleeping face, only sometimes turning to look at the dark hills and the wide dark lands that stretched out endless beyond.  
  
*  
  
They made camp within reach of the sound of the waters, spreading out blankets on a soft patch of grass as trails of stars bloomed across the sky, the blue deepening to indigo and then to crystalline black, and Thor stretched out and Loki beside him, still carrying on their conversation—at least, until Thor’s voice faded to an unintelligible murmur and then ceased completely.  
  
Loki hummed a note to himself; he might have nudged Thor back to wakefulness, teased him for falling asleep so early. But only one of them had rested in the middle of the day’s heat. It would not be fair.  
  
Instead he found himself thinking about the tales he had not told. Venom and scars and the pain at the end. Deaths and anger.  
  
He didn’t mind it, knowing that whatever happened, he and Thor always seemed to find each other. It was as if their fates were mingled; as long as the cycle of Ragnarok spun on, they would always return, like two halves of a whole. So many cycles it had happened, and no matter the pain they would always return.  
  
Now they were young again, and Thor asleep beside him, his eyes closed under a sky that no longer reflected their blue.  
  
Loki lay on his back, his fingers intertwined behind his neck, smiling, happy.  
  
He was excited to see what this one would bring.  
  
***


End file.
